MSE_F2016_05

We are logged so just none of these are necessarily relevant to today's lecture, but here are some other structural materials. Here's bulletproof glass okay. Four layers, or yeah four layers, three layers are glass adhesively bonded in between. It's very important on how you put the adhesive in. You don't want bubbles in between because you're supposed to be transparent, you don't want to be looking through bubbles. One layer is polycarbonate, which is the toughest plastic known. Used to be, used just that by itself is bulletproof glass, but we have better bullets now, and so it's basically a composite. This is made by the same company that makes Brits, called PAS, Protective Armor Systems okay. It's out in western Massachusetts, and they make a five and a 5-2 quarter inch version with like six layers or something, which goes on the windows of the president's car okay. And it will stop, the thicker one will stop an RPG. What's an RPG? Rocket-propelled grenade. That's kind of, you know what it's like, the, what do they call the things in Iraq, the shape charges.

I should have brought my shaped charge. Anyway, I have a shaped charge in my office. It's another story, maybe I'll bring it tomorrow. But anyway, a shaped charge is, shaped charges can typically go through about three feet of steel. In fact I've seen shaped charges that, I've seen the steel that a shaped charge went through three feet. Because I used to be on the advisory board for the Army Materiel Command group down at Aberdeen Proving Ground, where they make, they test shaped charges and stuff. It's actually interesting to go through armor. Back in the mid 80s they had developed shaped charges to the point where they could go through virtually any armor that was around. And one of my former students working for the Army told me the story, they lined up three old tanks on the battlefield and they shot a shaped charge through all six layers, you know, one side of armor, second tank, you know, six layers of armor. And an armored general tossed his cookies right there on the battlefield when he saw what a shaped charge could do. Within a year there was no shape charge that couldn't be defeated by the improved armor, which was basically ceramic armor.

So the shape charge is basically a liquid metal jet of copper that basically just eats right through the steel at the speed of sound or near the speed of sound. And if you put ceramic in there, your copper doesn't react with the ceramic, and so it doesn't destroy it. And so now there's all kinds of different armors. I mean it's proliferating, it's gotten very complex, and they're using supercomputers to model these things. One of the things that they developed for the armors, they had depleted uranium, basically just a half-inch diameter rod of depleted uranium, it was 36 inches long, and they would fire it at something. And when it hit the surface, the stresses in it as it hit the armor that it's trying to penetrate would essentially get to 300, 400 thousand psi, and so most materials would fracture and stuff.

So one of the ways to defeat the armor, one was ceramic armor to defeat the shape charge. The other thing to defeat depleted uranium armor, or bullets or, suppose whatever you want to call it, would be to have an explosive layer on the surface of the armor, so that as soon as it hits the armor, the projectile hits the armor, it would explode. And that would send a shockwave through this thing which would multiply the stress, and the whole thing would shatter, because you'd have 500 ksi, it'd be above the yield strength of the material because of the shockwave, reverse shockwave. So when I first went there back in the late 80s, they were working on modeling, and they were going to, I don't know if they've gotten to actually doing it, but they had to, suppose so the one would go in, hit the surface, set off the explosive, and another one would be in the same shell following right behind it, you know, 4,000 feet per second, and it would hit there again, because the surface can't explode twice right. So just following the hole that the first one hit, you know, it's like sending a fullback in with blocking for the halfback behind you, right. So the armor technology is actually pretty amazing how sophisticated it is.

And then what, some other armor stories. Anyway, that's enough armor stories. This is actually a composite material. It actually is a big heavy chunk of steel, and it has on the tip of it brazed, this whole chunk on the end is mostly tungsten carbide, but the very tip is sintered diamond okay. So it looks black because it's a bunch of diamond powders that have been sintered together, and it's a double-step braze, which is sort of interesting, we won't go into it. But this is to reclaim asphalt on the highway, you know, when they, you know, in the middle of the night and they're taking the asphalt off the highway and then resurfacing the highway. Well, they have a machine comes along with a bunch of these, and it's just a big auger, and it comes and it breaks up the old asphalt and throws it in the truck, and the truck takes it back to the asphalt plant, re-melted, and recycles the asphalt as new asphalt. But the problem is the tips of these things get a lot of abrasive wear, and the tungsten carbide, which is one of the hardest materials that we have, basically wears out. And you'd like it to last for an eight-hour shift, but they don't always last for an eight-hour.

Well someone developed basically a big chunk of tungsten carbide but the very tip with sintered diamond, and these things would last more than an eight-hour shift, much more, not much more but significantly more. And so someone asked me if I would evaluate the technology, because one company was considering investing in buying this other company's technology for the brazing of the sintered diamond. It's a good technology, but it turns out it was uneconomical because the cost of the sintered diamond was so high that you couldn't just, getting another factor of two in life was not sufficient. Sintered diamond's not cheap okay. So that one didn't work out. It worked out technically but it didn't work out economically. And I guess I got some other things, you've seen this before but we might talk about it later, and we'll talk about some of these other things. But so I'll bring in, try to bring in some other touchy-feely. So I have to remember to bring in the shape charge tomorrow, so far as that goes.

Oh, okay so we were talking about this thing. Oh, I don't have my pointer. We were talking about the relatively, in a structure over the life of the vehicle, and for ships it's only twenty cents a pound, or railroads. And the basis is you're going to use these things for 30 years. Automobile typically you'll get a hundred thousand miles before, on average, and it's two dollars a pound when you have gasoline at four dollars a gallon. Aircraft it's a hundred thousand hours. And spacecraft it's twenty thousand dollars a pound in orbit okay. And one of the things was at SpaceX and some of these other things with the reusable rockets and stuff hope to get the price down to five or ten thousand dollars a pound in orbit. So when you hear these stories, the aerospace engineers talk about we're going to colonize the moon okay, at five thousand dollars a pound okay for what we have to move up there, I mean just start figuring out what the tickets have to cost okay. We're going to have graded tickets on people who are lighter weight than others okay.

Anyway, okay, you can also look at these and look at the total market size just in the United States, and you see why automobiles drive things so much, and why Toyota taking over a significant fraction of the automotive market was so important. When I was living in Japan in the mid-80s, eighty, twenty-five percent of the Japanese industrial economy was based on Toyota, Nissan, in the automotive market okay, tremendous amount okay of their economy. And that's just 30 million cars in the United States. If we go to other countries, well actually that's how many vehicles, we don't make that many do we make, that many in the United States? Maybe we do, I can't remember. But in any case aircraft, Boeing is a very important contributor to our export market and stuff, but it's relatively small compared to other things. And the whole spacecraft industry is also relatively small, very high-tech materials. You read about all these things in the Wall Street Journal and other popular magazines and stuff, to tell you how wonderful these materials are, and they are very intriguing, but in terms of general economics, let's go to the big bucks okay. The big bucks are in more mundane materials.

One of the interesting things about automobiles, well, get to it a little bit, let's go to historically where the United States, and this is a very nonlinear time scale here, but historically where we spent our efforts. Today, the industrial revolution of the 1800s to 1950 is over okay. The red is the industrial sector, and right after World War Two we were in our heyday. We'd bombed out the rest of the world's industrial sectors and we really were the world's industrial powerhouse. And there's that famous story of, whoever was American Secretary of State and the Japanese ambassador says, "Mr. Secretary, we'd like to, Japan would like to export some products" — this is in the 1950s — "to the United States." And the US Secretary of State says, "Well, Japan doesn't make anything that we would want," okay. Well in the 1950 that might have been true, but the Japanese started learning to make steel and ships and automobiles and stuff.

But the manufacturing sector, industrial sector has decreased. The service sector has increased. The service sector was nothing back in the 1850s to speak of. The big sector back in the 1800s was agriculture. In fact in 1800 about ninety-five percent of the workforce was engaged in just feeding themselves okay. Now that might have been distribution of food and things, but most of them were out there working on growing crops. And that's why things like in the 1830s Cyrus McCormick and the, with the wheat harvester or whatever he made okay, was such an important invention, because so many people were out there cutting wheat by hand. The cotton gin by Eli Whitney and stuff, if you remember your ancient history of the Industrial Revolution, that's why those things were important, in that allowed the industrialization. And now we have the growth of the service sector. And then we have this other growing sector of government and welfare transfer payments, which is going to change the whole economic reality of our country in the world.

Okay, fabricated cost as a fraction of the cost of structural materials. As much as material scientists like to say "oh materials are wonderful," materials are a relatively small fraction of the fabricated cost of the material okay. The raw materials as the percent of the total cost is only ten or twenty percent of the actual final manufactured cost of a hundred percent of a product. Materials are small. It turns out design is roughly the same. Fabrication, which is mostly manufacturing, what the most people relegate to the mechanical engineers, is roughly double the material costs. Inspection and testing and quality control, which sort of MIT is over in the Sloan School for quality control, and non-destructive testing is something that we don't even talk about much okay, is equal to the material cost. And G&A management stuff is about ten percent. And you add all this stuff up and you're, you could either lose money or make money depending on how it all fits together. But what that means is that you want to think about, in the example, one of the examples, actually it's referenced in the paper of the materials for the 21st century, that there was a study done by the US Navy.

It turns out aircraft carriers gain about 250 tons a year. If you look at the last 50 years, you take the Nimitz-class carrier, and they built a new carrier every one or two years over that period, so we've had 20-some carriers since the Nimitz, and all the way up to, we actually have a new whole class, I can't remember what the name is, but anyway. But the Nimitz hull design went for about 50 years, and if you look at the weight of the Nimitz, which is in the 60,000-ton class, to whatever the last carriers were, which are up to about one and a half times that, the average weight gain on an aircraft carrier was 250 tons a year. Most of it unfortunately is up in the superstructure or near the top deck, instead of the aircraft deck and things, and that's a problem for stability okay. So there's a problem with weight gain, and so the Navy was looking at going to a higher strength steel for the hull. They're going to go to an HSLA 60, and they wanted to know what the cost savings might be.

Well it turns out that particular steel might cost you, it's a higher quality plate steel, and it might cost you two thousand dollars a ton, or a dollar a pound okay. I gave you a price of steel before, somewhere around 20 to 40 cents a pound, four hundred dollars a ton. Well this stuff is going to be two hundred dollars to, or two thousand dollars a ton. And they did about a million-dollar study at Newport News Shipbuilding and Dry Dock to find out what the as-fabricated cost would be, and they found the as-fabricated cost was going to be about ten thousand dollars a ton, or ten times as much. Well there's my ten percent again. I could have done that study for them for half a million rather than a million okay. Because the general rule of thumb that I've worked out over the years is about ten percent of the cost of a fabricated product is the material cost.

So what does that mean for a Ford Taurus that sells, or a Toyota Camry, it sells for 25 grand, there's only twenty-five hundred dollars worth of material in that car okay. However, if you go from steel to aluminum, there is an increase in cost because the aluminum's more expensive, and you might add three hundred dollars worth of material to the cost of that car. What's the big deal of going to an all-aluminum vehicle? Well it turns out all these other things for the aluminum can increase that cost by five or ten thousand dollars okay. So it's not just going from a twenty-five-thousand-dollar car to a twenty-five-thousand-five-hundred-dollar car. It's going from a twenty-five-thousand-dollar car to a thirty-thousand-dollar car when you go to an all-aluminum vehicle. And that's, you know, Audi 25 years ago came out with all-aluminum structures, but that was for $80,000 vehicles okay.

Now it turns out this ten percent figure has some variation. There's two areas I know of that I've come across where the cost of the raw material is thirty percent of the cost of building something, and that's pipelines, like the Keystone pipeline from, you know, the Canadian border down to Texas, the steel pipe is going to be thirty percent of the cost of digging the hole, putting it in the ground and everything else. In that case the material cost is a significant fraction. The other thing is utility transmission towers, you know these big ugly things, you know, have half-million-volt electrical lines on.

Yeah, right. Well first of all they're using the, they picked the highest volume vehicle in the world right, so there's a certain economies of scale that you get that dropped the price a little bit. But how they're making it work is they worked for 30 years on joining techniques. And the real problem for aluminum is the joining technology okay. And I passed around the thing that had steel rivets, and they have things like steel rivets because not everything on that F-150 is aluminum. They have to join aluminum to steel, and how do you do that without having a serious corrosion problem because of the galvanic action and the salt on the roads and things like that. And so there is 30 years worth of development. I mean, I first started seeing it back in the early 90s when I would go visit Detroit and I would see them in the research labs working on joining techniques and corrosion protection techniques, and it wasn't until 20 years later that they came out with an all-aluminum F-150.

In the early 90s I used to say that it wasn't, we didn't know how to build an all-aluminum vehicle, we had all the Duesenbergs and JP Morgan's Pierce-Arrow in the 1930s, just these were very expensive vehicles. We didn't know how to build at that time a twenty-five-thousand-dollar Ford Taurus that would sell for $25,000. Well, we still don't know how to build a thirty-thousand-dollar F-150, but we do know how to build a 35,000-dollar F-150. We brought the fabrication cost down. If I go back to the previous slide, we amortized a lot of the design and engineering over the largest vehicle production a lot in the world. We, this big thing here, is what they really drove to bring the cost down okay. So it's these two things in here, and they did some things in here. Plus to a certain extent they're hoping to keep their market share, and they may have taken a hit in here to a certain extent.

But in fact the whole raw material sector, the aluminum companies were never quite ready to invest in the production capacity that would be needed for the sheet material until one of the automotive companies was going to commit to a large vehicle platform. And when they did that, a lot of what you see in the growth in the aluminum business in the last two or three years, it's because Ford made the commitment to build an all-aluminum high-production vehicle. You know, the amount of aluminum Audi used, you know, it could be important to an aluminum company, but it's not that important, it's not going to change their product mix percentages. But when you go to a Ford F-150 with 800,000 vehicles a year, it makes a difference okay.

And in fact there are problems in that Ford didn't want to do it if there was only one aluminum supplier for it. That's another thing in the 600-billion-dollar automotive industry. GM and Ford will not commit to using a new material if there's only one supplier. So if you got a, if you've got a wonderful material monopolistic position, they'll thumb, you know, their nose at you, because they know what you're going to do to them. If you've got a monopoly hold on them, and they design it into a new vehicle okay, all of a sudden, "oh our costs have gone up," you know, only to them it's all their profit. You know, you would steal ten billion dollars worth of profit. So they want to have multiple suppliers, and that's another, this is another externality if you will okay, in terms of the automotive business.

The other thing that GM is very careful of is avoiding lawsuits. I mean, there's plenty, there are people out there who will essentially try to get something into GM and claim that GM made a commitment and then GM will say no we didn't make a commitment, and they'll sue GM for billions of dollars because they, restraint of trade or whatever they call it. And GM is very gun-shy of that because they've had some very expensive lawsuits okay. Other questions?

So pipelines, transmission towers, I just, well, I'm just finishing up working on a project that was for a million tons of steel for transmission towers, 1.3 billion dollar purchase of the steel to build the transmission towers. So that's thirteen hundred dollars a ton for galvanized steel. Automotive and aircraft it's about ten percent. Spacecraft it may be down in around two percent. And semiconductors, well obviously that's not a structural material, and your actual material cost is relatively low as far as that goes. Materials as a percent of the total, ma'am yes?

I'm in structural here too. Yeah. Space junk, because it's all engineering and fancy composites. I mean, this is as fabricated, this is twenty-thousand-dollar-a-pound material okay, that's what it costs. I actually, this material only costs twelve thousand dollars a pound okay, as fabricated into the structure. But the actual material weight in the structure, it's only one or two, the cost of material is only two percent of that. Even though you're using carbon fiber composites and things like that, the material costs which for an automobile it would be ten percent of the cost, but for a spacecraft, and what a lot of that is, the inspection and stuff goes way up okay.

Think of the Hubble telescope okay. The, for a Hubble telescope, and I use that as an example because if you remember the Hubble telescope had a few design problems on the mirrors, and they had a two-billion-dollar project that all of a sudden could have been junked if it hadn't been for Lincoln Lab developing a military technology to control distortion, or to compute away the distortions of the atmosphere. One of the reasons for putting the Hubble telescope up in space was to get rid of the atmospheric distortions. Well they put it up there and they find they had distortions in their mirror. Well it turns out we'll never build another Hubble telescope to do optical imaging in space, because now, because of places like MIT Lincoln Lab, they can shoot a laser beam through the atmosphere, measure the distortion of the laser beam going through the air. I mean, so it may be shooting down from, I don't know if it's shooting up or down okay, but there's a satellite up there and it's measuring the distortion of the beam going through the atmosphere, and then they back-calculate all that, and they can now take pictures from Earth through the atmosphere that are just as accurate as the Hubble telescope, because they are doing computer correction for the distortions of the laser beam going through the air. So we will never need to build another Hubble telescope okay.

But why did they do that? Well, if you want to read the president's golf card okay, and what his score is from a hundred miles in space, you've got it correct okay. Unless he uses really big golf carts okay, see if he's cheating on his golf score okay. That answer your question? Okay.

Student: I have a question about, like, when you, steel for transmission towers, what versus wood?

Yeah, okay. A lot of like how is, ICT early policy, it's not, I'm not, you know, I'm not talking about the ones that are taking 10,000 volts down the street to a transformer. I'm talking about the half-million-, that million-volt transmission towers that are about, you know, 100 feet tall, 150 feet tall, these are the big utility transmission towers okay. The other ones they call distribution towers okay. They actually have a hierarchy of terms. The transmission towers are when you transfer, trance, transporting five hundred to a thousand miles, and then the distribution is when you're trying to do 10 miles down the road okay, from some power transformer base. And the, in fact the wood is now, I, when I was a kid the wood would last 30 or 40 years, now they got treatments for the wood and it never rots in a hundred years okay, so far as that goes. So the wood stuff has gotten better but they're still ugly, and if you can afford it you'd rather bury in the ground and have a neighborhood that doesn't have a bunch of wires all over everywhere okay. There's actually a famous old picture of New York City with all the telephone wires, don't know if you've ever seen that, in around 1900 or whatever, it's just nothing but telephone wires in the street. Okay, other questions?

Okay, so we went through that, and hopefully answered, clarified that if we want to talk about materials as a percent of the total manufacturing costs, whether it's ten percent or twenty percent, if steel costs four hundred dollars a, pound, a ton, you can actually afford to make ships and railroads out of it, but you barely can. And these are the materials that are cheap enough to make ships or railroad cars. If you're willing to go to twenty percent, you actually, we do make aluminum railroad cars because they're lighter weight, and you're pulling all that weight around okay. Automobiles at ten percent at steel, at 20 percent you can use aluminum and plastics, although you have a hard time using some of the plastics, but we'll talk about that in a little bit. They have built the BMW i3 and i7 okay, got a graphite fiber, but that's, we can talk about whether that's how they did that okay. And actually that was a student's presentation in this class, was the BMW i3, and but he had studied this for some time, although he was a BMW employee, he was an LGO student as I remember anyway. But he explained how they could beat this thing, but it's also, you start loading up the i3 and it's a sixty-thousand-dollar vehicle, and the i7 is a hundred-thousand-dollar vehicle. So it's like the all-aluminum Audi okay. The first ones that come in are on the high end of the scale okay.

Aircraft, aluminum for years, and now we're switching over to composites. That's not what limited the composites. The thing that limited the composites was the fabricability okay. Could they repair them and things like that okay. And the American Airlines jet that landed in Brooklyn or whatever, when it took off out of Kennedy or whatever, that was basically, they had repaired the empennage. They had problems in production and they repaired the empennage, and that was actually a student's presentation, was American Airlines. I can't remember the flight. Was it due to pilot error or was it due to the repair, the composite repair? And people are still on both sides of that okay. That's another, that was another project, a student presentation. A spacecraft, you can certainly afford composites, and you can even afford some refractory metals like beryllium that are just horrendously expensive. I know what I have down here. But it also depends on your economic class. Some people in the Ozarks will build their houses out of wood, and other people in the Hamptons will build them out of whatever they care about, or Martha's Vineyard. There's a big example right now where people were building these 20-million-dollar mega-mansions in Martha's Vineyard.

So one of the people who I like to quote is Robert Sprague, who was a materials manager for GE Aircraft Engines in Cincinnati. And he said, whenever you first hear about the properties of a new material, write it down, because those are the best properties the material will ever have okay. He said that 30 or 40 years ago, and he said that with a lot of experience. And Jim Williams who replaced him, he was dean of engineering at Ohio State, or he went and then he went back there after a while, but he replaced Sprague, and he had a corollary: whenever you first hear about the cost of a new material, write it down, because that's the lowest cost it will ever have. New materials always, their properties always degrade with time, and their cost always increases with time. So be careful about claims for new materials.

Another thing that people do with new materials is, they will be very careful about how they phrase the properties. And the example I like to give there was a Professor Gary Wnek, who was assistant professor in this department. He left before tenure ever came. He was really a chemist but he worked on polymers. And this was back 25, 30 years ago when electrically conductive polymers were sort of a new thing okay. And he was giving a talk in the Chipman Room about some of his research on electrically conductive polymers. And at the time the polymer was polyacetylene. And ordinarily polymers are covalently bonded, there's no free electrons, and that's why they're excellent insulators. Polyacetylene has a bunch of double bonds okay, and so, properly doped, it can have some free electrons and so it's electrically conductive. And he was pointing out that the specific electrical resistivity of this polyacetylene was better than that of copper, and therefore things like big rotor generators and rotating machinery and motors and things would all be using polyacetylene or other conductive polymers in the future. And I thought, wow, that's pretty impressive.

Until the next morning, I love how shaving them, I was cutting myself, all of a sudden I realized, wait a second, wait a second. Today aluminum has a better specific electrical conductivity than copper, but we still wind those motors and those big generators out of copper. Why? Even though it's spinning at a very high rate of speed, we need the lowest electrical resistivity okay. We don't need the lowest specific electrical resistivity. What was he doing? He was dividing by the density. And because polymers have a low density, their specific electrical resistivity was better than copper. But that was not the figure of merit for rotating equipment. It was the lowest electrical conductivity. And the only thing that's better, if I know, the one element on the periodic table that is, is silver. And why didn't we use, why don't we use silver? Because it's a hundred times more expensive than copper okay. So there is a cost consideration, but it's a factor of a hundred.

In fact during World War Two at Oak Ridge National Lab they used big magnets to separate the uranium okay. They had these basically a great big mass spec, and they would separate the uranium to make, get the fissile uranium from the non-fissile uranium isotopes, what, u-238 versus u-2-third, can't remember anyway. They just had a great big mass spec and had all the uranium hexafluoride vapors running around in a circle, and they would separate out the lighter ones. And it turns out copper was in very short supply during World War Two, so they wound their magnets out of silver from the US Mint in Philadelphia. And after the war they had to return this silver to the US Mint okay, but nothing happened to it other than be fabricated into wire. But silver is better. Yes?

Student: [inaudible question about the quote]

What, don't you believe about it? You can disbelieve it, it's not my quote, um, go ahead. I'm just propagating it.

Yeah, it's definitely got a better, reason, is it, as a structural material? It's a functional material. We're talking about structural materials that go in engines okay. Spike, right. And now, you have to recognize what they're coming from. The jet engine business, and people come in with fancy composites or some new metal alloys, it's supposed to be higher temperature or whatever, and things always ended up never quite having the properties they wanted. You're talking about something still on the learning curve where we're seeing tenfold reductions in price every five years or whatever. That's sort of a different maturity. These are further down the maturity curve okay. So now it's not true for every material, but I mean, there's some wisdom to what they say, in that certainly in their industry okay.

Yeah. So it's, see, well that was a problem with polyacetylene electrical conductors okay, they oxidize in the air within minutes okay. So as long as you want to run your generator in an argon atmosphere or a vacuum, it's fine okay. So they don't always mention about some of the Achilles heels that some of these things have. So the perovskites are a good example okay, they don't have the stability. Well if someone comes along with a breakthrough to improve that stability, then they may take over okay. They've got certain beneficial properties.

But these guys, I mean, Jim Williams used to, he coined the term boutique materials okay. And the reason he called them boutique is, some of these materials, well, there's going to be a market for these things of a thousand pounds a year. And who's going to make it? What company is going to invest in some super-duper material if there's only a thousand pounds a year? There's a market volume issue here too, not just what you can make in a laboratory. And I guess part of the point here is people will claim all kinds of things for what they can make in a laboratory, and they can be very interesting from a scientific point of view. From an engineering point of view it's crap okay.

Well, not specifically for materials, but, that I know of, but in general one out of 20 companies will be successful okay. 19 will fail for every one that's successful. The other thing about materials, which is not really something I came up with, most people credit a paper I wrote in 1995 that I didn't quote who I heard it from, but it takes 20 years to bring a new material to market. And I gave you a paper on bringing new materials to market, that 1995 paper in Technology Review. At the time it was the most requested article ever in Technology Review, because everybody was excited about new materials. And in there I talked about the problems of bringing new materials to market, which most people, that's what these guys are saying. I actually wrote an article about it, and you can read about refrigerators which Brian will talk about later this week when I'm gone. I'll be lecturing tomorrow, Brian's lecturing Wednesday, and then Dr. Belmar will be Thursday. We're going to give you Friday off, that's an MIT holiday okay. It's not that we're generous, it's just that it's an MIT holiday. Anyway.

You have to be, the point here really is not necessarily what they say about their class of materials. It's really about, be very cautious when people start making claims about new materials. Yes?

That's energy density. The best, well, how are you going to raise your money unless you've got the best, right? And so the people who are saying this, well, I'll give you an example that really sort of bugs me no end, because I'm a steel guy okay. There was a guy in chemical engineering, graduated from MIT, went to work for US Steel, and he learned that molten steel is a universal solvent, just like water is a universal solvent for lots of things. You can dissolve lots of things in water. Molten iron is a wonderful high-temperature universal solvent. So he decided he was going to throw a lot of the environmental waste into steel, and it would just dissolve, and then we could sell the steel. And he gave this idea to US Steel, and the people at US Steel were not stupid okay. They looked at it and said, now if you want it, you can have the patent okay.

Well that did not deter him okay. He patented it, he came to MIT, he got together with the head of our Technology Licensing Office, a guy named John Preston, and they started marketing this as the solution to the world's pollution problems. We could throw everything into a bath of molten steel. And they called it Liquid Metal Technologies okay. They raised 130 million overnight. These two guys were worth 25 million apiece okay. When Vice President Gore was talking at MIT at Kresge Auditorium, John Preston, head of the Technology Licensing Office, was in charge of putting together the program with panelists about new technologies. Who did he put on as one of the four panelists, other than Chris whatever his name was again, remember, the guy who come off the patent, Don Sadoway and I said, "Hey wait a second, seems like a little conflict of interest here okay. You're using your position at MIT to..." We actually called up the Vice President Research and said, hey, little conflict of interest here. And MIT in their great wisdom and high integrity said, "Oh MIT's got a piece of this action, so we don't think there's a problem" okay. It's a true story.

Plus Sadoway and I said okay, got same types of crooks in the administration. There were a few problems with that. There's an element that will destroy steel refractories called sodium okay. Do you think there's any sodium in most of the waste streams? If you want to throw garbage, there's sodium all over, right. It's a couple percent of the ocean okay, and it's in all kinds of other things, and you would just, you would destroy all your steelmaking technology. They built a plant down south of here, and there were several very distinguished faculty members, department heads and others who were on the board of directors and had pieces of this company. And I was just deathly afraid that someday this was going to come, and MIT is going to get a big black eye when all the chickens came home to roost because of these types of things. People were saying this is wonderful. I was giving a talk, this was back when we had what's called LFM before LGO, and someone actually asked me before class what I thought of Liquid Metal Technologies, because it was all over the Wall Street Journal, this wonderful MIT technology and stuff. And I said, I can't remember how I phrased it, but I basically did not say anything complimentary about it.

And it turns out, oh, the student was asking because his father was investor and was thinking about investing. And I said, don't, I said this is pure crap okay, if they knew anything about steel technology. The other thing, there's another element called chlorine okay. And you know what happens when you put chlorine into a steel furnace? You get phosgene gas, COCl2. Phosgene gas is one of the gases they used in World War One, World War One gassed people okay. It's toxic. So Chris and John knew nothing about this. These MIT professors okay, who were making some money off this new startup, I don't know if they knew anything about it or not, and I just, I just laid low. I thought, I tried to say some things about it. Well, anyway, this was a lecture on Wall Street Loans as they said, I guess it came up because they were reading the Wall Street Journal. And there's a famous quote that I made over there, I said, well, once you read about it in the Wall Street Journal, it's no longer news okay. So don't do your investing based on what you read in the Wall Street Journal, because everywhere, all the other investors are reading that same thing that same day.

But they were claiming, they were going to get rid, they were going to get a 30-million-dollar contract from the Department of Energy to get rid of radioactive waste. Wait a second, you're going to throw radioactive waste into a big steel bath, and somehow it's going to transmute those nuclei into a non-radioactive form? I mean, this is new science here, folks. But they were getting 30 million dollars from your government and my government, part of our tax money. And this is just, you know, how bad is the science, right? Well, what finally happened was about three years later, they were indicted okay. And fortunately MIT's name was not in the article on the newspaper, it didn't list MIT as a startup okay. So some of these things get really nasty okay. Be careful, try to go find somebody who knows what they're talking about.